BACCHUS Student Trustees Urge You to Consider Running for a BACCHUS Leadership Position

 By Sheldon Jackson and Courtney Diener, BACCHUS Student Trustees

Welcome to a new semester and new school year! We hope you had a great summer vacation. We are excited to see what activities and programs everyone is doing this fall semester. Currently, we are preparing for General Assembly in Orlando, FL, November 1-4, 2012. The theme this year is The Magic of Peer Education: Healthy Students, Healthy Campuses.

One thing we as Student Trustees want every BACCHUS peer educator to consider is running to be elected a member on the Student Advisory Committee or a Student Trustee. This is an amazing opportunity to be involved within The BACCHUS Network. Holding a student leadership position within The BACCHUS Network is truly a privilege and a honor. During a term in one of these positions, students will learn so much more about The BACCHUS Network and the way BACCHUS operates. If you become a member of the Student Advisory Committee, you will network with members in your BACCHUS area, with other members throughout the country, fellow SAC and the Student Trustees. The skills and experiences gained through these positions directly apply to your academic and career goals and provide you the opportunity to have an impact on both a regional and national level.

BACCHUS truly is a student run organization and, hopefully, a lot of students will run for either an SAC or a Student Trustee position. For more information about running for an SAC or a Student Trustee position, visit the BACCHUS website.

We hope everyone is as excited as we are with a new school year and even more excited for General Assembly.  Please contact us, Sheldon or Courtney if you have any questions about running for an office. We are happy to share our experiences with you.

Get Ahead This Summer

By Courtney Diener and Sheldon Jackson, BACCHUS Student Trustees

As warm weather and sunshine begins to grace our presence, you might be asking yourself the question, "What role does summer play for peer educators and advisors?"

The obvious answer is that summer is a great time for everyone to take time to relax. That means summer barbeques, getting some vitamin D from the sun (remember to wear sunblock) and maybe watching a game on television. But summer is also great time for your peer education groups to get ahead.

Summer is a great time to take inventory of your stock of peer education materials and to place orders for the supplies you will need in the fall. Summer is also a great time where your peer educators can work on recruitment of new peer educators for the fall. Some campuses host summer retreats where their peer educators can work on their presenting skills and building a solid team. Other campuses work on updating and improving scripts or programs. Even just familiarizing yourself with The BACCHUS Network websites and campaigns can prepare you to kick-start your peer education group into a great fall.

So this summer in between all the pool parties, walks in the park and outside fun, consider spending some time getting your peer education group ready for fall.

Five Super Easy Outreach Programs for the End of Fall

We have passed the halfway point of the Fall term. Finals and the holidays are fast approaching. Your peer educators are exhausted from all the programs they have implemented and need to catch up on course work; yet, promoting healthy decisions to the student body is even more important at this time of year. Here are five quick programming ideas that do not take a lot of time, people power, or funding.

Stress Busters

You can feel the tension rising on campus as it gets closer to finals. Everyone is talking about being stressed. Spread the word on how to reduce stress through social media. Have your peer educators brainstorm ways to reduce stress and take turns posting them on Facebook, Twitter, and your campus website. Have a little more time? Create a video of stress relieving breathing exercises and post it to YouTube.

Impaired Driving Prevention

Holidays are a high-risk time for driving under the influence. Create a holiday pledge for students to sign and promise to not drink and drive, let friends drink and drive, or ride with an impaired driver. Print the pledge and distribute in the residence halls and student center, or create a group or fan page on Facebook. Develop your own pledge or use the following: This holiday season, I give my friends and myself the gift of life. I pledge to not drink and drive, ride with an impaired driver, let my friends drink and drive or ride with an impaired driver, and to always wear my seatbelt. If your peer educators have the time and energy, have them serve BAC-tails, delicious non-alcoholic drinks, in the student center and invite students to sign the pledge.

Managing Money

As first year students approach the completion of three months or more of living away from home, many may realize that they have not done well with managing their money. Growing credit card debt along with shrinking savings may be causing stress. Partner with a finance faculty member or your campus banking institution to develop a bookmark of money management tips. Have the bookmarks available at the bookstore, library, and ATMs.

Healthy Holiday Eating

Many students are looking forward to home cooking and a break from dining hall food or cooking for themselves. Holiday celebrations and parties may temp students to over indulge in their favorite foods. Publish a list of your peer educators’ favorite tips for healthy eating over the holidays on your website, in your “Potty Press,” or on table tents and place them in the dining hall.

New Year’s Resolutions

The New Year, and new academic term, is a great time to make a behavior change for health. Encourage students to begin planning before January 1^st about how they will make the change, such as quitting smoking, beginning an exercise program, or managing money better. Create a planning worksheet using the Stages of Change model. Ask students to write down

• What are the good things and the not-so-good things about the behavior they want to change?
• What would be different in their life if they change the behavior?
• Who would support them in the process to make this change?
• What is one thing they can do before January 1, 2011 that will help them get ready to make the change? For example, picking up a quit kit from your office or contacting the campus recreation center about spring exercise classes.

Provide a list of campus and community resources that will help students develop their healthy habits. If students are willing to provide an email address, your peer educators can follow up with them at the beginning of the new academic term to provide motivation and resources to continue the efforts to become healthier.

Students may not have time to attend programs at this time of year, but they will appreciate receiving timely health promotion tips to get them to the end of the school term and position them for a great holiday break. If your peer education group has a quick and easy program, please share it by commenting on this blog.

Five Tips for Great Classroom Presentations

As peer education advisors, peer educators, and health educators, we want to be asked by faculty to present on collegiate health and safety issues. Classroom presentations provide outreach to students, increase awareness of services available on campus, and are a great peer educator recruitment tool. These presentations can also be challenging. Fifty-minutes is not a lot of time to thoroughly cover many health issues.

Rachel Billowitz, MPH (Rachel.Billowitz@nau.edu), a health sciences lecturer at Northern Arizona University, suggests the following tips to increase the effectiveness of one-time presentations to classes. These were originally posted to the HEDIR Listserv in regards to sexual health presentations and are reprinted here with permission.

1. If possible, try to ask the instructor for two class periods, so you are not trying to condense all the content into one.

2. Ask the students to do the reading prior to your presentation so they are familiar with the content.

3. Work with the class instructor to solicit anonymous questions from the students about the topics. Small squares of paper collected in an envelope work just fine. Obtain those questions before the presentation, and tailor your presentation to address the unique concerns of that student group.

4. Do not try to focus on delivering a large amount of factual information in the presentation. Instead, consider focusing your presentation on activities that ask the students to apply the knowledge gained from the reading to real-world scenarios to help facilitate skill building. For example, put students into groups of three and ask them to: brainstorm factors a heterosexual couple should consider when selecting a birth control method; brainstorm ways to negotiate condom use; brainstorm ways to give and get consent in a fun/ sexy way, etc.

5. Connect students with online resources that can link them to medically accurate sexual [or other] health information. Several sites have functions that allow people to ask questions anonymously and a health educator posts the answers within a day or two. An excellent site is the Go Ask Alice site from Columbia.

Thank you to Rachel for these great tips. Do you have any additional tips for classroom presentations? Share your tips with others by posting them as a comment to this article.

Five Peer Educator Recruiting Blunders to Avoid

Now is the time to plan your recruitment strategies for the 2010-11 academic year. Here are five major mistakes to avoid. Planning ahead will increase your recruiting success.

1. Waiting until September to start recruiting.

First year and transfer students are attending summer orientation, checking your school’s website for information, and receiving emails from other groups on your campus throughout the summer months. Begin recruiting now by having a presence at summer orientation events, collecting new student emails, and sending emails or e-newsletters throughout the summer. Be sure your web page is up-to-date and clearly explains how to get involved. Invite new students to join your Facebook group and post your recruitment meetings as events.

2. Only recruiting first year students.

The National Peer Educator Study (NPES) conducted by Michigan State University has found that the majority of peer educators became involved after their freshman year. Juniors and seniors are looking for opportunities to apply what they are learning in their majors and to build career skills. Decide from what academic subjects you would like to attract students and talk with faculty about how being a peer educator provides practical, career-relevant experience (i.e., leadership, delegation, time and management planning).

3. Not answering the “W” questions.

Before a student commits to becoming a peer educator, he or she wants to know four things: Why me? Why now? What for? and Who says? Some students do not see themselves as peer educators. If you see in a student the qualities necessary to be a peer educator, tell him or her. When recruiting, talk about the issues students on your campus are facing now and how peer educators can help. Highlight your peer education group’s past successes. Your current peer educators are the best spokespersons for your group. Encourage them to speak about what they have received from being a peer educator.

4. Making it hard to be a peer educator.

It is okay to be selective in choosing peer educators (click here for sample peer educator applications and interview questions: http://www.bacchusnetwork.org/peeredapps.asp). We also need to recognize that peer educators are students first and have busy schedules. Think about how you can make being a peer educator work in a student’s schedule. Develop position descriptions for peer educators that clearly define what they are to do and the time it takes. Find the day and time when the fewest classes take place and schedule your meetings during that time. Plan your trainings and events with the academic calendar in mind. Having large, intensive events during midterms will create frustration and burn out. Finally, offer a safety net to students who become overwhelmed by allowing them take a break from being a peer educator to attend to other issues.

5. Not making recruitment everyone’s responsibility.

Recruitment is an ongoing, year round process. Every program, event, web posting, or flyer is a potential recruitment tool. As mentioned earlier, your peer educators are your best spokespersons for your group and your best recruiters. If they speak positively of their peer education experience and share their enthusiasm for what they are doing, others will want to join. Encourage them to invite students to the meeting and teach them how to welcome new people to the group.

Do you have a recruiting tip? Share it with others by commenting on this article.

posted by: Ann Quinn-Zobeck, BACCHUS Director of Education and Training